The Villain Professor's Second Chance

Sylvanna's ascent began with cold metal and ended in thunder. The spire rose from swamp mist, lightning rods protruding like needles stitched into angry sky. Old winds shrieked through their hollow cores, every gust sparking faint St-Elmo fire. She planted crampon hooks and hauled herself upward, each stride practiced from a lifetime in canopies and cliff-faces. Ice glazed every rung, brittle as spun sugar; she moved lightly to avoid shearing metal from stone.

Raëdrithar circled below, updrafts buffeting its wide storm-feathered wings. The chimera tracked her progress with soft keens—sonar pings in the headwind.

Halfway up, another pulse rolled. The rod lattice hummed like a bell struck by invisible hammer. Power tingled up her arms, pricking skin beneath gambeson. With it came the vision. The man from earlier dreams—broad shoulders, face obscured by swirl of black ash—appeared again. He crouched beside a cradle draped in snow-white linen, reached in with gentle hands, then turned, vanishing into a corridor of shadows. Each time she tried to follow, a door slammed in her mind, echoing shut.

She halted, chest heaving. "Not now," she hissed—whether to vision, memory, or the storm itself she wasn't sure.

Lightning flickered in her peripheral, a warning nibble. She refocused: numbers, wind speed, arc distances. The mana wheel crown loomed above—huge as a millstone, studded with copper runes now glowing faint teal. She needed to lance it with a controlled surge, not a detonation.

Sylvanna scaled the final metre, swung onto a catwalk that buzzed under her boots. Frost cracked. She knelt, unslung her bow, and snapped a fat-shafted arrow into place. Its head, wrapped in silver filigree, thrummed with barely suppressed current. She timed her breathing: in for seven, hold, out for seven—keeping pace with the ocean pulse so her magic wouldn't stutter. Lightning coiled in her clavicles, eager.

"Easy," she whispered to no one. The storm listened.

She drew. Muscle cables burned deliciously. The arrow's rune channels flared cobalt, bright enough to paint bone beneath skin.

A final memory jabbed: the dark man's profile, turned aside. She felt rather than heard his unspoken warning—an impression of caution, of great distance. Her pulse staggered.

Focus. She released.

The arrow screamed, a razor of light punching into the wheel's heart. Runes erupted sun-bright, then settled into a steady, disciplined cascade of sparks—its energy bleeding along engraved gutters she'd calculated earlier. The wheel whined, slowed. Success.

But each discharge still slapped her senses. Electricity whipped up the shaft into her arms. She grit teeth, grounding through greaves into iron platform. Blue fire danced between the rods, weaving a crown above her head that could be seen clear to the frozen horizon.

Below, Vaelira's forces saw the flare and roared approval. Even the brine-automata staggered, limbs pausing mid-strike as sensor arrays glitched from energy burst.

Sylvanna breathed through the aftershocks, palms smoking. A small smile—satisfied—until the next pulse slammed, stronger than the last. The wheel's runes surged from teal to sickly amber, reversing flow.

"Greedy thing," she muttered. Lightning cracked down her braid. She adjusted stabiliser bolts, fingers numb. Static licked iron. Another surge threatened.

Behind her left eye, the dream corridor's door shivered.

Far beneath the frozen marsh, Draven slipped from the narrow maintenance shaft into the axle chamber and felt the temperature jump ten, maybe fifteen degrees. Moist heat clung to his face — steam boiled from fissures in the worn masonry, carrying a sour tang of brine and sap that bit the nose and coated the tongue. Lamps of milky crystal glowed along the vaulted ceiling, their ancient filaments fluttering like slow moth-wings. In their wan light the room resembled a submerged basilica: pillars coated in emerald algae, puddles reflecting the glow with oil-slick rainbows, stalactites of rust poised to drip at the slightest tremor.

Dominating everything was the axle.

It lay on its side like some leviathan spine, a horizontal screw fat as a river barge, each iron thread the height of a man's shoulders. Slime laminated the grooves, and every thirty-six-and-a-fraction seconds a ripple of force shivered through the metal, setting the whole assembly in motion. The turning was measured, implacable — a pulse wrought into steel. Draven watched it for only half a breath, long enough to confirm the cadence he'd memorized from Korin's lantern, then dismissed it from conscious thought. Machinery was predictable; the variables were the people inside the room.

He sensed her before he saw her.

Azra stood at the closest pylon, half-lit by a trembling lamp. Blood soaked her left sleeve so thoroughly the fabric clung like a second skin, yet she held her weight square. The ragged cut of her coat revealed glimpses of lacquered armor plates, cracked but unbowed. Her face was pale where moonlight had never kissed, and her eyes — deep, brittle topaz — fixed on Draven with a scholar's focus, as though she were memorising each angle for a later report.

In her right hand coiled a length of copper primer wire. Each flex released sparks along its length, tiny serpents of alchemic reaction dancing over the metal. She did not wince when the sparks licked her knuckles.

"Sabotage?" Draven asked.

His voice carried easily in the chamber's acoustics, low and even. He kept both daggers down by his thighs, blades angled back so reflected lamplight would not glare into her eyes — no need to provoke a premature strike.

"Correction," Azra replied. Her tone held no triumph, only a tense conviction, as though she spoke an equation she fully expected him to solve. "You're too efficient. Weirs must shatter loudly enough that even Vostyr's lies burst with them."

Draven's gaze flicked to the primer wire, then to the central switchbox she had opened at the base of the pylon. Six glyph capacitors glowed amber within, their containment sigils partially scratched. It would take her ninety seconds to overload them by herself. He calculated distance, reach, probable strike order, and filed it away.

"You'll drown ten thousand farms," he said.

Azra's chin rose a fraction. "And you'll let a king incinerate half a kingdom to keep his hands clean. Choose your monster, Granger."

In the half-second of breathing space that followed, Draven catalogued every visible detail: the tremor in her left hand that betrayed blood loss; the faint bubbling at the wire tip where she'd kissed it to the glyph plate; the moisture on the floor, already creeping toward her boots — live current plus saltwater, a hazard she hadn't noticed. Variables resolved; solution selected.

He moved.

His first step glided, almost casual, then accelerated into a blur. Daggers slashed twin arcs at non-lethal angles — intended to disarm, sever the wire, preserve options. Azra's gauntlet met the right-hand blade, Leviathan shell shrieking where steel bit the lacquer. Sparks leapt sideways, spattering algae with embers that hissed out at once. She pivoted, redirecting his momentum, and lashed the primer wire like a whip. It cracked overhead, shedding prismatic motes. Draven ducked, the hiss of copper missing his scalp by a hair.

They circled, boots splashing in shallow water. Each tested the other with sharp probing feints — Draven's as neat as calligraphy, Azra's more sweeping, as if she fought with an invisible partner's rhythm. He recognized a covert City-Edge style in her foot placement: sacrifice distance for leverage, strike on third beat. She'd trained somewhere ruthless.

A tremor rolled through the floor. The axle groaned, plates vibrating so hard flakes of rust snowed onto their shoulders. Draven felt the tremor echo his pulse; his breath stayed steady, nineteen per minute, perfect. Azra's eyes darted to the ceiling where dust poured from seams, reading what he already knew: the mana wheel overhead was spiking again. If it ruptured, the river would force its memory load through every ventilation shaft. Hundreds of square kilometres would drown in liquified past.

"It'll tear the delta apart," she hissed. The primer wire uncoiled, electricity whining along its length like an animal scenting blood.

"Then help me fix it," Draven answered.

For three heartbeat intervals they faced each other, motionless, blades and wire trembling with potential. Azra's expression shivered beneath her composure — anger wrestling panic, devotion vying with logic. Then the floor pitched again, harder. Water sloshed up around their boots. One of the capacitors sparked violently, a warning note.

She cursed under her breath in a language he half understood, then tossed the free end of the wire.

Draven snatched it mid-air, reversed grip, and vaulted over a slime-coated beam to the far control panel. His mind ran the wiring diagram in advance — vertical series, two capacitors slaved in sequence, a third isolated for redundancy. Even a novice would cross them in parallel to fry the core; he needed them in a slow bleed pattern. Digging fingers into a tool pouch at his hip, he drew a ceramic spanner, cracked the glyph bracket, and threaded copper through the rune channel so the overload current would vent upward.

Azra mirrored him across the axle, sliding in blood-slick water, gloved fingers deft despite tremor. She yanked a stuck relay, teeth bared in silent snarl when it resisted. Her heel slipped on algae; Draven heard the gasp, but didn't look. Trust, for the span of a single task.

Two more pulses hammered the chamber in quick succession. The timing shift was new — thirty-five-point-eight. Faster. Upstairs, Sylvanna fought the wheel's greed. Good, he thought; it means she's still alive.

He sighted Azra through spinning axle spokes. "On your mark," he called.

"Three—" she began.

Lightning cracked somewhere far above, the sound shaking dust loose in a curtain. Her voice wavered, but continued: "—two, one."

Their palms slammed synchronous onto the master glyph.

Sound exploded.

The chamber roof appeared to peel back in a single sheet of light. Pure cerulean force shot through the vent stack, carving a tunnel into the night. Thunder followed a breath later, slamming him against the pylon. The heat flash blistered water into steam that rolled across the floor in scalding blankets. For an instant, Draven's world narrowed to vibration and color — everything tinted indigo, pressure flattening his ears so even thought went muffled.

Then silence. Real, almost unbearable.

The axle shuddered once, twice, then stilled. Its iron threads leaked trickles of water that glimmered, not glowed. The pulse had stopped. Draven steadied against the capacitors, throat dry. Azra sagged opposite, panting hard, copper wire fused to her gauntlet. Sparks guttered out.

Cracks spider-webbed above. Chunks of masonry plummeted, smashing into knee-deep pools. The chamber began a low, ominous grind.

"Out,"